This article is just so wrong in many ways. It is again one of those articles that you give a conclusion first and then fill pieces all over the place to "support" it. This is one of the major reasons foreigner keep wrongly predicted what is going to happen in China.
This is such a BS. Just check yesterday's 163.com (One of the main Chinese news site) on China's vote on Syria issue. There were over 100 thousands posts (with explicit ip address) praising US and bashing Chinese government saying it doesn't care human life. For a moment I thought the site was controlled by CIA. Today people criticize Chinese government much more fierce than people in US. As long as you don't receive money from foreign agencies and at the same time say the government is illegal since it is not voted (Like Liu Xiaobo does).
Different country have different expectations on the government, it is deep in culture. Most Chinese see the government as parents, yes sometimes it could be a little abusive, but as long as it takes care of the country and people, people will live with it. For instance, if Chinese government's responses on natural disasters are as slow as US government on Katrina, or Japanese government response on the recent earth quick, it would've been overthrown already. People go to the street not to overthrow the central government, but try to get as much attention as possible FROM the CENTRAL government so wrongs can be corrected. That's the reason it is so funny to see journalist predicting China could be in deep trouble/China Spring since every year there're 4000 large scale protests. They just have no idea what Chinese are thinking about. This is no longer 1989.
As a matter of fact, I believe Chinese government pay more attention to public rages than United States. For instance, the D-train incident someone mentioned above that caused 35 death, a 90 pages (?) very detailed accident report was give in December and 55 officials got sacked because of the public outrage. I don't see that happens in other developing countries, and developed countries.